If you're reading this, you are probably not buffeted by daily waves of physical terror. You may fear job loss or emotional loss, but you probably don't fear that somebody is going to slash your throat or that a gang will invade your house come dinnertime, carrying away your family and property. We take order for granted.

But billions of people live in a different emotional landscape, enveloped by hidden terror. Many of these people live in the developing world.

When we send young people out to help these regions, we tell them they are there to tackle "poverty," using the sort of economic designation we're comfortable with. We usually assume that scarcity is the big challenge to be faced. We send them to dig wells or bring bed nets or distribute food or money, and, of course, that's wonderful work.

But as Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros point out in their perspective-altering book, "The Locust Effect," these places are not just grappling with poverty. They are marked by disorder, violence and man-inflicted suffering.

People in many parts of the world simply live beyond the apparatus of law and order. The District of Columbia spends about $850 per person per year on police. In Bangladesh, the government spends less than $1.50 per person per year on police. The cops are just not there.

Even when there is some legal system in place, it's not designed to impose law and order. It is there to protect the regime from the people. The well-connected want a system that can be bought and sold.

Haugen and Boutros tell the story of an 8-year-old Peruvian girl named Yuri whose body was found in the street one morning, her skull crushed in, her legs wrapped in cables and her underwear at her ankles. The evidence pointed to a member of one of the richer families in the town, so the police and prosecutors destroyed the evidence.

Yuri's family wanted to find the killer, but they couldn't afford to pay the prosecutor. The family sold all their livestock to hire lawyers, who took money but abandoned the case. This is utterly typical.

We in the affluent world live on one side of a great global threshold. Our fundamental security was established by our ancestors. We tend to assume that the primary problems of politics are economic and that the injustices of the world can be addressed with economic levers. When empires like the Soviet Union collapse, we send in economists with privatization plans instead of cops to help create rule of law. When thuggish autocracies invade neighbors we impose sanctions.

But people without our inherited institutions live on the other side of the threshold and have a different reality. They live within a contagion of chaos. They live where the realities include violence and theft. Their world is governed less by economic incentives and more by raw fear. In a world without functioning institutions, predatory behavior and the passions of domination and submission blot out economic logic.

The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It's creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short.

Haugen is president of a human rights organization called the International Justice Mission, which tries to help people around the world build the institutions of law. One virtue of his group is it stares evil in the eyes and helps people confront thugs who inflict predatory cruelty. Not every organization can confront human behavior when it exists unrestrained by effective law. It's easier to avoid this reality.

Police training might be less uplifting than some of the other stories that attract donor dollars. But, in every society, order has to be wrung out of exploitation. Unless cruelty is tamed, poverty will persist.